Inferno
by Hypokritika
Summary: Insane, psychic vampire meets insane, eyeless ex-CIA operative
1. Everybody's a comedian

A.N./Disclaimers: This is not a part of Deus Ex Machina; it's an OUaTiM/Buffy the Vampire Slayer Crossover. I didn't post this in the "BtVS Crossovers" section of FF.net because this fic is more OUaTiM than BtVS, and it's (hopefully…!) not necessary to have watched the series in order to understand the fic. Sands belongs to Robert Rodriguez and Drusilla belongs to Joss Whedon. No copyright infringement was intended in the creation of this fic. 

Sands felt his knees buckle. The torn muscles in his thigh screamed as he finally let his legs give way and he fell down down down until he was on his ass. God, this was funnier than a _Simpsons_ episode. Too bad the thought of laughing made him want to curl up and weep from the pain. Forget dignity dude, dignity was for idiots and heroes.

Now that he had the time to think about it, the pain and nausea and God knew what else, has become all encompassing. It had been easy to overlook shit when he was hopped up on adrenalin and drugs, and having a grand and merry time shooting everyone to jolly frickin' Hell.

Party was over now, obviously. Nobody wanted to hang around to help clean up the mess.

The fallen CIA officer painted a disturbing picture; covered in gore, naked eye sockets staring emptily into the street from behind sunglasses that had miraculously stayed on even after the universe had very merrily gone to fucktown. He was surprised that his young guide hadn't run off screaming yet. 

He was wet everywhere. He knew most of it was blood, but he wondered if he'd pissed himself. 

"Fuck off, kid." He thought he heard himself say to the boy. "Leave me here to die."

Maybe he had passed out then, maybe the kid had already left. He heard no footsteps. Either the boy was standing perfectly still, staring at him with solemn, little boy eyes, and had been for –how long has it been?  An hour? A year? A nanosecond? - or the kid had already run off, and Sands had been too busy drowning in a formless void of unflagging agony to notice. There was no answer save the buzzing of flies drawn to the growing stench of putrescence around him. It was probably the latter. The flies congregated around the sticky, bloodied mess on his face. He would have been more than happy to let them cover his entire head and fly up his eye sockets into his fucking brain, but even the barest whisper of wind created by the buzzing of the insects' wings created a roaring sort of torture that didn't quite agree with him. So he halfheartedly waved the persistent bastards away with a limp hand. But they were persistent bastards, so they just kept on coming. His arm was impossibly heavy, and practically numb. Maybe it'll fall off now. _When will the hurting stop?_ a voice in his head screamed. He didn't want to acknowledge the petulant, helpless little baby-voice, but it was echoing rather painfully across his cranium, and despite himself, he was in unanimous agreement with it.

He didn't want to think about the implications of his current condition; the possibility of a life lived in constant darkness and all attendant idiosyncrasies. Instead, he wished he had a gun. He'd stick the barrel in his mouth and pull the trigger, and he'd blow his brains out so that his skull cavity would match his eye sockets. 

But by some sick cosmic joke, he had somehow lost his guns, and –surprise surprise- he didn't have any eyes, so he couldn't fucking look for them. Oh joy.

His head reeled crazily, and images flashed in his mind like some PCP-flavored nightmare from his college days. Stupid fucking high-quality cartel drugs were still in his stupid fucking system. Thought the adrenalin would've washed them all out. Heh. 

El Mariachi grew two extra heads and went on a rampage with his guitar. Orange monkeys. The crazy doctor's white white teeth, grinning, grinning... more orange monkeys. Everything faded, inevitably, into black, and he was lucid again. Or at least as lucid as a man with three bullet wounds and no fucking eyeballs could possibly be.

Did scrambled eyeballs taste like scrambled eggs? _Stop. Thinking. You. Imbecile._

He would have liked nothing better than to swear up and down from high Heaven to Hades, creatively insulting whatever crazy, fucked-up deity was orchestrating this magnificent travesty. But when he opened his mouth, pain traveled across his face like electricity, creating explosions where his eyes were supposed to be. 

Agony was overrated, he decided. There was nothing noble about pain, other than the fact that it fucked you up the ass, no matter who the fuck you were, and that no matter how used to it you thought you were, it still threw you for a loop.

He swam in and out of consciousness, but he wasn't too sure. The darkness was everywhere, and it was pretty hard to distinguish between reality and Never Never Land when all he could make out was this humongous, claustrophobic void. And maybe he was falling, but there was the ground, and there was his ass, and his ass hurt like a motherfucker. No impact. He felt chills travel across his body, aggravating the bullet wounds on arm and legs, and pulling him back from the brink of sweet oblivion with each wave. Shock? Blood loss? Fever brought about by infection? He didn't think he cared anymore at this point. Hell, at this point, he wouldn't have cared if the 2003 Playmate of the Year gave him a blowjob right then and there. Not that he was in any condition to get sucked off, anyway.

Funny how all the shit he'd been through led to this moment. It seemed like a poetic, pretty, utterly senseless way to die: eyeless, assaulted by fucking flies, and slowly bleeding to death in a corpse-strewn sidewalk somewhere in some buttfuck town in Mexico. Or maybe he'll die quickly. Some merciful motherfucker might actually be kind enough to condescend to shoot him in the head. He wanted to laugh. Fat chance of _that_ happening anytime soon. He probably looked deader than the carcasses around him. If, by some felicitous fluke of fate, some random stranger should just _happen_ pass by this godforsaken little avenue, Sands would probably be mistaken for just another corpse and be left there to rot.

That was funny too.

Ha fucking ha.


	2. Oraçión

Oraçión 

The air was cooling rapidly. Sunset. Time, it seemed, was made of that stuff they put in lava lamps. Or maybe he'd been out cold for a few millennia or so. Everything hurt too much for him to be dead yet, he was sure of that much.

From somewhere close by but inexplicably far away, church bells rang. It was six o' clock. _Oraçión_. Prayer time. Everybody in this little rathole town stopped mid-sentence and an appropriately pious silence fell. Maybe a little more pious today; so many people were dead after all, thanks to the little coup he'd orchestrated. They'd pray the Angelus; a Hail Mary or three, and some other esoteric Catholic shit he didn't want to bother worrying about, considering the fact that he was now conscious enough to tell how cold it was becoming.

Maybe it was getting dark now, too. Far be it for _him_ to know. Hi, no fucking _eyes_, in case you haven't noticed.

At least the flies were gone.

"Oh!"

He tensed, surprised that he hadn't been able to pick up this person's approach. "How pretty!" 

She clapped her hands.

The voice had a deranged, lilting, childlike quality to it. She spoke in English, in a twisted sort of cockney that would've sounded less disturbing in eighteen ninety-five. In London. But this was Mexico, and he was already freaked out as it was, thanks to his current state of eyelessness.

He wanted to take his gun, aim, and shoot. No questions. But his arms didn't seem to want to move, and he didn't have his guns. The fatigue was marrow-deep, freezing him in a bloody, rag-doll tableau.

"I've found you, my prince!" She was close now, he could tell from her voice. Oddly enough, he felt no heat radiating from her body; only stillness and thirteen different breeds of _wrong_. "My dark prince. So much like my white knight, my Spike, glowing bright with burning baby fishes."

Who the fuck _was_ this person?

"The stars told me you'd be here, pretty prince. They told me you'd be in the darkness. And they said there would be pain. Such lovely pain I taste. So many different, nummy flavors. And so pretty, too. They told me you'd be pretty, my dark prince."

She touched his face. He flinched. Her hands were cadaver-cold.

"You burn, yes?"

He shook his head. The world reeled. Christ no, he was fucking _freezing_. When did it get so frickin' _cold_?

"Yes you do, my prince. My lovely prince. You burn for vengeance and death. Lovely, lovely death. Like fireflies. Like fire. Terrible fire. Burning you."

He opened his mouth to speak, felt dried blood flake off his cheeks and sparks of liquid agony explode in his line of vision. Oh, wait. No vision. No eyes. Ha ha! "Fuck you."

She giggled and stood up. He heard the rustle of silk petticoats and soft hair. She clapped her hands again, and she danced in a circle, footsteps resonating loudly in his ears. She was stirring up the blood-soaked dust.

"Yes, my beautiful dark prince, my prince of darkness! My contradiction and my twin! We shall dance together in the moonlight and you will be mine and I yours! We will fuck! We will feed! We will sing to the rainbows and the night!" She stopped abruptly and dropped to the ground in front of him with a thud and a whoosh of cool air. Her hands were on his face now. In his hair. Tender caresses that sent flashes of pure torture through his head, creating nuclei of molten agonymiserypain in the hollow, bleeding holes in his face. He saw bursts of colored light created by raw nerve endings firing futilely into emptiness. They jolted him. Made him gasp.

Her hands were soft and cool. Playful, so it seemed. She was probably cocking her head right now, staring at him with wide and vacant eyes, lost in the fascination of touch and the sight of his suffering.

And he _prayed_. Esoteric, Catholic _Oraçión_ shit. He heard his own voice in his head, chanting the Angelus in Latin, then Spanish, then English. Three Hail Marys. _Holy Mary, mother of God…_ He was not a religious man. God could have been a talking donkey with three dicks, for all he cared. But the prayers were looping in his mind, like a broken cassette tape. Fitting, really, what with those fucking bells clanging the obligation of religion and prayer in the distance, and the sacredprofane silence hanging heavy in the motionless air. 

Yeah, it was creepy. Some kind of fucked-up defense mechanism his subconscious dreamed up, most probably. Where the hell did he _learn_ those prayers, anyway?

_…pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death-_

She grabbed him, suddenly ferocious, fingernails digging into his scalp. He was too weak and in too much goddamn pain to resist. He let out a weak, startled cry as he felt pointed teeth sink into the juncture where shoulder and neck met. Then there was a _pulling_, a furious, luscious pulling. If it hadn't been for the fact that he had very little blood to spare as of the moment and was running out of it with disturbing swiftness, he would've had a raging hard-on right now.

He was getting sucked off, but not in the way he had expected, and certainly not by the 2003 Playmate of the Year. Unless Playboy had a section for the undead…

And everything was fading. The world was huge, inevitably black and black and blacker still, consciousness swimming and then sinking and then gone. 

Almost.

She pulled away.

"Drink." She said, pressing cold, still wrist against cold, quivering lips and tongue.

And it was fucking _delicious_. Nectar and light and Jesus on a pink pogo stick he could fucking _see_! _Oh you beautiful bitch. You bitch you cunt you whore you magnificent queen don't let it stop!_ Everything was color and radiance, sunshine burning burning burning…! He drank deeply, grasping with groping fingers the soft, cool fount of his salvation.

His eternal damnation.

_Amen._


End file.
